The House voted Friday to prevent President Trump from launching into war with Iran without getting Congress’ approval first, after more than two dozen Republicans joined Democrats to include the provision in the House’s annual defense authorization bill.
The move sets up a likely showdown with the Senate over whether the Iran restriction, which includes an exception for cases of self-defense, will be included in the final bill negotiated between the two chambers. The House voted 220 to 197 Friday to pass its version of the annual defense bill, despite Trump’s threat to veto the legislation.
Republican leaders in the House and Senate have argued that the Iran language members included in the bill by a vote of 251 to 170 would send a bad message to Tehran that the United States is divided, complicating the president’s ability to manage escalating tensions. Supporters of the provision in the Senate failed to come up with enough votes last month to include a similar Iran measure in its defense bill.
The debate comes amid increased friction between Iran and the United States and its allies. President Trump says he authorized, then called off an air strike last month in response to Iran’s downing of a U.S. surveillance drone. On Friday, Iran demanded that Britain release an Iranian supertanker seized off the coast of Gibraltar last week.
[‘We were cocked & loaded’: Trump’s account of Iran attack plan facing scrutiny]
The Iran amendment is just one of several high-profile measures that lawmakers voted this week to include in the first defense authorization bill Democrats have steered through the House since taking over the majority earlier this year.
Those measures, which range from ending U.S. participation in Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen to undoing President Trump’s ban on transgender troops, helped secure the support of liberal Democrats from the congressional Progressive Caucus, who had previously warned that they might vote against the defense bill.
But those measures lost Democrats what little Republican support existed for the House’s defense bill. Two Republican members of the Armed Services panel voted in favor of the bill in committee last month; no Republicans endorsed the House’s defense bill Friday morning.
That stands in sharp contrast to the traditionally bipartisan turnout for defense bills, even when the parties spar over provisions along the way. Instead, Republican leaders accused Democrats of using the must-pass measure to play politics in a way that is “shameful,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Friday morning.
“Our national security is not a game. But that is exactly how Democrats are treating it,” McCarthy said of the bill.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), visibly riled at the charge, retorted that Republicans “can oppose [the bill], that’s fine, but to say we don’t care about national security . . . is a baldfaced lie.”
“In fact, our bill isn’t just good, it’s better than the ones that the Republican Party has put together, because we believe the Pentagon should be accountable,” Smith continued.
At the heart of the dispute between Republicans and Democrats is a disagreement over how much money Congress should allocate to the Pentagon and military this year. Republicans and the Trump administration want a $750 billion bill, which is the overall size of the defense authorization bill that the Senate passed last month. But the House’s bill clocks in at $733 billion — a figure that Smith argued military leaders endorsed previously.
For liberal Democrats, $733 billion was too steep a jump over the current fiscal year’s $717 billion authorization. In an effort to level out spending, they proposed a $16.8 billion reduction to the war funding authorized under the bill, but the effort failed to pass the House Friday morning, after Republicans and many Democrats opposed it.
The House also voted Friday against measures from Reps. Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to prevent defense money and facilities from being used to house migrant children and undocumented immigrants. But members endorsed a measure from House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) to block defense dollars from being used to house foreign nationals detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Members also endorsed a repeal of the 2002 authorization for use of military force that was passed to approve the Iraq invasion, and stated that they believe the 2001 AUMF, adopted after the Sept. 11 attack to greenlight hostilities against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, ought to be retired and replaced with a time-limited authorization.
They also voted in favor of an amendment to suspend for one year the sale of air-to-ground munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, one of several efforts in the bill to limit U.S. support for the Saudi-led military coalition’s operations in Yemen’s civil war, and prevent the kingdom from acquiring U.S.-made weapons of war.
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